


Blooming

by Branches_Cut_The_Sky_Open



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Sort of suicidal ideation, Spoiled Food, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), The Corruption Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Vast Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Web Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), gratuitous use of author's personal experiences, gratuitous use of cordyceps, ive only been to scotland once so sorry if my recollections of inverness and edinburgh are lacking, like. loss of control, not canon typical worms but the fungal equivalent thereof, set somewhere in s4, uh standard warnings for the corruption and the web
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28059648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Branches_Cut_The_Sky_Open/pseuds/Branches_Cut_The_Sky_Open
Summary: Statement #0161118Statement of Mairead Brannigan, regarding the strange behavior and subsequent death of his partner. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Blooming

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into horror so. I hope it works. Beta reader was the wondrous @mothjons.

[TAPE CLICKS ON]

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Mairead Brannigan, regarding the strange behavior and subsequent death of his partner.

Original statement given: 18 November, 2016

Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

You know, getting diagnosed a few years ago was a real relief. There are not many things quite as isolating as understanding that there is something wrong with you, but having no words for it, and having no one believe you. The things that are easy for your classmates are inexplicably difficult for you, and your head is so full of thoughts you just have to say them– even if they’re inappropriate or ill-timed. The gentle disapproval or annoyance of your teachers leaves you unaccountably devastated. So, yeah, you could say that my diagnosis was a little earth-shattering.

When I was a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with mushrooms. I’m not sure how it started, really, but for a few months in year six, there was little else I could think or talk about. It was one of a lifelong string of oddly specific fixations, but it was long before I got diagnosed with ADHD, so I managed to both confuse and infuriate everyone around me with my single-mindedness. There’s this way people talk to you when they’re sick of hearing about whatever you’re talking about, but are trying to be polite. They always think they’re being so subtle, but they’re not. I started to recognize it young, and as I got older and my self control improved incrementally, though never as far as my classmates were, it would shut me right up. The first tolerant nod, or long-suffering “mhm” would have me clamming right up with tears in my eyes.

So meeting Briar Skilstad was a bit of a miracle.

We had a class together, my first term at the University of Edinburgh. It was a history course, western civilization, ancient to medieval. The professor was american, and one of the best I’ve ever had. A tall, thin white guy, completely bald, who dressed in cardigans and corduroys, and wore a newsboy cap every day when he walked into the classroom. But he was a captivating lecturer, electrically fascinated by what he taught, and eager to impart his delight to all of us. I never took more complete notes than I did in his class. He started our first class with a disclaimer that western civilization as an archetype wasn’t even conceived of until the enlightenment, and was a very outdated format, but he thought it could still be useful. And then he made it useful. He’s not important, I just like to gush about him at any chance I get. I remember one day, somewhat early in fall term, in deference to the warm weather, he had unbuttoned the cuffs of his plaid shirt, and I glimpsed, to my shock, the ends of what appeared to be full-color tattoo sleeves on both arms.

Anyway, his class was where I met Briar. I was late on my first day, unable to find room 109, and when I skidded into the class, breathless, five minutes after 11, Professor Brooks just waved away my gasped apologies and told me to pick a seat. There were a few choices, but only one real option. Briar had a shock of dark curls, and I could see earrings made of pocket-sized playing cards. The queen of hearts. The law of classroom seating while queer; pick the gayest-looking person in class. Briar was definitely that.

They looked up as I approached, and I cocked my brows in question. They nodded. I began to rifle for pen and pad, and the lecture commenced.

It was about the beginning of humanity. Australopithecus, Neanderthals, hunter-gatherer societies, the rise of agriculture. The first million-odd years of humanity, summed up in a two hour lecture. When he dismissed us, I felt a little bereft. Briar stood up at the same time I did, and we walked out together. They introduced themself, and we started walking in the same direction. I pulled out my phone at one point, flipping it over to show Briar the queen of hearts playing card stuck in the back of the case. They laughed, and I wanted to drown in it a little. The next class, I sat down in the same seat I’d been in before, hoping that Briar would sit next to me. They did. The lecture was about Mesopotamia. Professor Brooks was talking about the Epic of Gilgamesh, and when he got to the part where Gilgamesh and Enkidu wrestle each other naked and then become fast friends, Briar leaned over to me, a small smirk in their eyes, and whispered “fellas…” and I nearly choked on my mediocre coffee.

That became our pattern. We sat together, trading snide little comments and laughing, me taking my uncharacteristically diligent notes, them drawing in their notebooks. They were so pretty, and so funny, and their laugh made me feel full of soft light every time I brought it out. I asked for their number, claiming it was just in case one of us missed class. They gave it, and I spent an afternoon debating whether it would be weird to text them first.

I didn’t have to find out. They texted me.

Neither of us missed class, as it turned out. Between the promise of Briar’s long fingers drawing beautiful things, and my growing admiration for our professor, there was little that could have kept me away.

Briar and I began to see each other outside of class, too. First going for coffee, or lunch, then to each other’s dorm rooms. Just sitting together, reading or drawing or talking. That’s why meeting them was so wonderful; I’d never met anyone who would just let me infodump before. They could even tell: I’d start fidgeting, or something, they never told me what it was that tipped them off. They’d take out their sketchbook and gaze at me, dark eyes mischievous, pen uncapped, and say “Ok, go.” And then they’d let me talk and talk, and they’d listen. It was magic. I was in love. Still am, really.

One day, in October, I brought one of my favorite little books with me. It was a holdover from my mushroom phase, an american field guide, which made it not terribly useful in Edinburgh, but I loved it dearly. It was called _All That Rain Promises and More_ , by David Arora. The cover bore the image of a man in a tuxedo, trumpet over one arm, standing in a field, hands full of chanterelles, a delighted grin on his face. Ten-year-old me had dog-eared it to hell and back. I was early to class, so I sat examining it, lost in nostalgia and the lingering traces of my obsession. When Briar sat down next to me, they were instantly interested. I showed them the book, and, as Professor Brooks rushed into the room minutes before the class was to start, as was his wont, I promised to bring my big book over to Briar’s to show.

My big book was, indeed, big. Over six hundred pages, each featuring a different fungus, with full-color, full-size photos. It wasn’t a field guide, more of a coffee table book, but it was beautiful.

I knocked on Briars door that night. October 18th, 2013. It was nearly dark. I had _The Book of Fungi_ in one arm, and a four-pack of cock & bull ginger beer in my other hand. So, technically, I didn’t knock. I kicked the door. They knew it was me.

Their roommate was out, and we settled onto their bed with our bottles and the book. They looked at me and said, “Ok, go.” I started to talk about my favorite mushrooms, flipping back and forth in the book, showing them pixie’s parasol, and poison fire coral, and beefsteak fungus, and egghead mottlegills, and the american titan. I was rambling about how witches butter, if dried, will reconstitute to almost its exact former state if you give it enough water, when they put one finger on the side of my chin, and turned me to face them. Their eyes dropped to my lips, and they whispered “May I?” I nodded. They kissed me.

They kissed me a lot. I was dizzy by the time we came up for air. Half oxygen deprivation, half weeks of pining satisfied at once.

When they pulled away, they murmured to me, very quietly, “I have wanted to do that since day fucking one.” I wanted to melt. Then they pulled a little further away and said “I can tell you’re not done with the book yet.” Grabbing my hand in theirs, they kissed the back of it and said, grinning at me, “Ok, go.”

I flipped to the very end of the book. There was the horn stalkball, which rots keratin, and then, the thing I wanted to get to; cordyceps.

They always made me shiver a little, but I love them. Loved them. They’re a parasitic fungus, most varieties correspond to a species of insect. The spores infect the insect, and the insect loses itself. The fungus takes over, the insect’s behavior growing more and more strange and erratic, until the fungus finally forces the host up as high as it can go, so the spores spread as widely as possible. Once it is holding fast to the tallest twig it can reach, the insect finally dies, and the fungus grows from its corpse, until the fruiting body releases spores to start again. In videos, the infected insects sometimes appear to be dancing.

Briar seemed just as fascinated as I was. But at that point, I had reached the end of my conversational spool, and I was thinking about kissing again. They didn’t object.

Briar and I dated for a couple years, up until they died. Our second year of uni, we moved in together, out of school housing, splitting rent on a little flat a few blocks off Elm Row. Our landlord was a nice man named Roland, and the flat was beautiful. When I started questioning a second time, they bought me a binder and helped me pick this name. I was definitely in love. I’m still in love.

Looking back, I think the trouble started with Leaky’s Books. We had taken the train up to Inverness for their birthday. They’d grown up there, so we’d gone to have lunch with their parents and then while away the day. There was a bookstore there, rambling, tight, with a balcony overlooking the main room and a spiral staircase leading up to it. It was beautiful; it smelled perfectly musty, like old bindings. I found a copy of Mary Cecily Barker’s _Flower Fairies_ , and Briar found— something else.

It was clearly old, and seemed to have been sitting on that shelf for a long time. On the cover was a moth, embossed in the dark leather. The moth’s wings appeared to be sprouting some kind of mushroom. They waved me over to look at it, brushing cobwebs off it as they did so, and as I approached, I watched them open it, and get a puff of what I assumed at the time was dust, right in the face.

The book had no publication information, and on the inside cover there was a bookplate, reading “From the library of Jurgen Leitner.” The title page simply read _Champignons_. As might be indicated by that title, the whole book was in french, which neither of us spoke. The illustrations were pretty enough, but the book was £25, which was slightly more than either of us were willing to shell out for a book we couldn’t read. So we left it there.

You’d think that would matter.

Really, it took so long, I didn’t notice at first. Briar had never been a particularly still person; they were always drawing, or knitting, or something. But they tended to move with purpose– where I was constantly bouncing my knee, or tapping pens and fingers, they seemed to channel all their kinetic energy into whatever they were working on. They’d be completely still, except for their hands. But, in December of last year, they started to fidget. A lot. They became antsy and aimless. Sometimes they would just stand up and leave. They would pace around the flat for hours at a time. Their cuticles grew as ragged as mine. I asked them again and again what was wrong, but they just kept saying they felt restless. Itchy, all the time. Not physically itchy, they insisted, but just twitchy and ill-contented. We started walking places more and more. They stopped taking elevators, seeming to prefer stairs in every possible situation. They’d bound up them, two at a time. They always held my hand, as we walked back down together.

They seemed almost normal for a while, just a more scattered version of themself, until I woke up to find their side of the bed empty. It was still dark out, and the clock read 3:41 am. I still don’t really know how I knew, but something drew me to the roof. I found them there, sitting near the edge, though thankfully not on it. I sometimes wonder, if they had been sitting on the edge, would I have caught on sooner that something was up.

But they were just sitting, staring out at the city, and they were as still as I’d seen them in weeks. I settled next to them, and they curled into me, turning their face up. I kissed them. We stayed on that roof for a long while.

So, my partner was a little twitchier than usual, and they had begun to spend more time on roofs. That was fine.

But one day, I came home from work to find them dancing in the kitchen. They weren’t usually a dancer, and this… didn’t look right, somehow. Too jerky, their eyes too blank. Their smile was rictus, slightly wider than looked comfortable, and their limbs didn’t seem to be entirely their own. It was extremely weird. But I just got in the shower. When I came out, they were sketching at the kitchen table, their foot bouncing slightly to the music playing from their phone. _And oh my love, my love/we both go down together_. I ruffled their hair as I went by.

But things kept getting weirder. I kept coming home to them dancing, tugged to and fro as if by strange puppet strings. I also started to notice that the food in our fridge was spoiling a lot faster than usual. Mold grew over leftovers only a day or two old, and new milk curdled in the carton.

That was what I finally asked them about. After I had bought the third box of eggs in as many days, I asked them what was going on. They looked at me, blankly, and I reeled back in shock. If I hadn’t spent two years looking at their face from every possible angle, I don’t know if I could have noticed. Their skin was dark enough to almost disguise it, but there was an odd blue cast to their complexion, as if something bloomed, just below the surface. Their eyes were crusted with sleep, as if they’d just woken up. They hadn’t.

As if jolted by my shock, they rubbed the scum off their eyelashes, and reached toward me. I let them take my hand, kiss me gently. I told myself they probably hadn’t slept much. That was all.

A week ago, I woke up to an empty bed, again. It had been happening more and more, me coming aware of a cold expanse of sheets, the windows still dark. Or as dark as they get in Edinburgh.

I knew that night was different. For weeks, I had ignored the strange discoloration of their skin, the dirt beneath their nails that now seemed permanent, the dancing. I don’t know what it was about our dark and empty room that had me leaping out of bed, still in my giant shirt, tripping as I yanked on my sweatpants, bolting up the stairs to the roof.

When I got there, it was too late. Briar was sitting on the edge of the roof, and they would have looked almost peaceful, even with their legs dangling into the five-story drop to the ground. One hand gripped the stones of the roof, and the other was upheld, as if reaching to catch a feather. As I watched, something about their silhouette began to shift, just a little.

I couldn’t make myself approach. Instead, I called to them, lingering in the doorway. They turned, and I couldn’t really see them in the dark, but I could see the white of their teeth flash as they smiled at me and said “Mairead, I love you.” Then they blinked, and I watched what I realized now were spores float away from their eyelashes, illuminated by the city glow beyond them. They looked at me, eyes a little exultant, and a little terrified, and they nodded to the door behind me and said “Ok, go.”

Then, they began to bloom. I watched in mute horror, frozen in the doorway, as the shifting coalesced into growing. Pale branching stalks, like a coral mushroom, sprouted from their shoulders, their back, the palm of their outstretched hand. They grew fast, reminding me, horribly, of the first time I’d ever heard of cordyceps. Planet Earth, and the time-lapse of a dead ant, mandibles gripping a stalk, as a long, spindly fruiting body grew from its head. At the time, I had been enraptured.

Suddenly, I remembered what would happen when the fruiting bodies reached maturity. The expulsion of spores. The height to ensure they reached as far as possible.

I didn’t want to leave them. Some desperate part of me that had just gotten so used to them being with me, being around, leaning on each other, told me to stay. To go to them. To hold them, so they wouldn’t be so scared. I wanted to try and save them, or, barring that, just to be close to them a little longer, and damn the consequences.

But I remembered their instruction. _Ok, go_.

And so, I ducked back into the stairwell, closing the door tightly. I watched through the glass as Briar was lost to the sprouting horrible fungus.

I still can’t decide if I regret it. I want to say that it’s better to be alive, and that I know they would have wanted it, which is a phrase I have always hated deeply, because who are any of us to say what the dead want?

But I remember the look in their eyes before they… bloomed. They looked afraid, but also… excited, maybe even delighted. There was some strange rapture in their face that I can’t understand, and a terrible little part of me desperately wants to.

I’m going back to Inverness next week, to look for that book again. I’m going to burn it.

Probably.

ARCHIVIST

Statement ends.

Well, that’s unsettling. I must say, I have a hard time with the way the entities seem to intersect. The most obvious one likely to be responsible for Mx. Skilstad’s demise would be the Corruption, but the cobwebs on the book make it seem like the Web had a hand in it. The way that cordyceps fungi seem to remove the agency of their victims also does seem to suggest the influence of the Mother of Puppets. And the thing about heights… could the Vast be involved? Cordyceps are somewhat fascinating; I don’t blame Mr. Brannigan for his interest. I believe I watched the same episode of Planet Earth when I was a child, although I found it far less captivating than Mr. Brannigan did.

[ARCHIVIST SIGHS]

Well, I- I don’t have a research team anymore, but I thought I’d do some digging on my own. I called Leaky’s Books in Inverness, asking about the book, only one of the employees seemed to know what I was talking about. They said they remembered selling it a couple of years ago. When I asked to whom, he said it was a young man, who he remembered as seeming fairly distraught. He said he’d smelled rather strongly of, and I quote, “forest loam.”

Mairead Brannigan apparently disappeared in late 2016. He was declared missing by the parents of his late partner, in December of that year. There’s an article here from July of 2017, regarding his death; apparently his body was found after neighbors complained of the smell. According to the article, which has far more detail than I would expect from an, er, a family newspaper, says that in the room in which Mr. Brannigan’s body lay, every surface, including the body, was covered in spindly white coral mushrooms.

Other than that, I did some cursory searching for Briar Skilstad. They were an art student at the University of Edinburgh until their death in late 2016. Without- [HEAVY PAUSE] without Tim or Sasha, I can’t get access to morgue records or anything similar, but I found Mx. Skilstad’s obituary from the _Inverness Courier_. It simply describes them as a talented artist, devoted partner, and beloved child. Not very enlightening.

End recording.

[TAPE CLICKS OFF]

**Author's Note:**

> Leaky's books is a real, and excellent, bookstore in Inverness, but I didn't find any evil books when I was there. All That Rain Promises and More is also a real book, as is The Book of Fungi. I recommend them both wholeheartedly. The song is "we both go down together" by the decemberists.


End file.
